Biography

Hollis Alpert was a major movie critic who rose to prominence in the 1960s, best remembered today for his role in creating the National Society of Film Critics. He was born on September 24, 1916 in Herkimer, New York and served as a combat historian with the U.S. Army during the Second World War. Some of his accounts of warfare were published by magazines, which gave him entrée into New York-based mass media after he was demobilized.

In the period 1950-56, Alpert worked as an editor for the "New York Times" while freelancing as a book and movie reviewer. He was hired as a movie critic by the "Saturday Review", where he rose to prominence. In 1966, Alpert, Pauline Kael and other critics who worked for magazines founded the the National Society of Film Critics because the New York Film Critics Circle was dominated by movie reviewers toiling for the big New York daily newspapers. Alpert, Kael and others found the established critics be stodgy and old-fashioned, so they created their own organization to herald what they considered the new, vital works that were revolutionizing cinema.

After leaving the "Saturday Review" in 1975, Alpert worked for the "American Film Magazine" until 1981. On November 18, 2007, he died in Naples Florida at the age of 91.
- IMDb mini biography by: Jon C. Hopwood

Member of the jury at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1966

Film critic; a cofounder of the National Society of Film Critics in 1966.

[on Bonnie and Clyde (1967)] I should say at once that, filmically, "Bonnie and Clyde" represents a high point in the directional work of Arthur Penn; that it is exceedingly well-made; that it has an astonishingly good performance by Warren Beatty as Clyde Barrow . . . What is bothersome about the picture is that David Newman and Robert Benton, the writers, aren't able to make clear their own attitudes toward the two criminals.